Blog by Eniko Fejer — Food stories RSS

When I was a child, we had an apple tree in our garden, so we never bought any apples from the shop. The apple pie recipe below was for using up apples that have fallen too early and were too hard and sour to eat raw. I learnt to avoid food waste at an early age. We produced our own food in the garden, not just apples. As children we had to help pick up the apples from the ground. When making the apple pie we also helped with the peeling and grating. Occasionally, making this dish was a family activity with mum or grandma. I still remember the sweet cinnamon smell that filled the house while the pie was...

There is a special place in my heart for walnuts. In the garden of our family home back in Hungary we have an almost 60-year-old walnut tree that witnessed all our important family occasions (both happy and sad). My grandparents planted it when they bought the land and built the house on it in the 1970s.

I remember collecting the walnuts, drying them in the garage for weeks in sacks, collecting the fallen leaves from the ground and towards the end of November cracking the walnuts open inside the house. We had years when the tree produced around 8-12 kg of walnuts. After I moved out my mum always made sure we had enough so she always...

When I was a child, in front of our house we had 3 sour cherry trees. The sour cherry was abundant in our household. We made them into jams, cordials, compotes, we ate them raw straight from the trees as an afternoon snack, made cold soup with them, and we baked them into sweets and cakes. One of the bakes were poppy seed and sour cherry strudel. I was a child in the 1990s, ready-made filo pastry was not available on the supermarket shelves yet. Making strudel dough from scratch is an art itself (and takes a village), so strudel was a luxurious summer treat that took a day to...

When I was a child, we had a huge garden full of vegetables and fruits. We had grapes, tomatoes, peppers, strawberries, a pear tree, a walnut tree, a plum tree, onions, carrots, watermelons, potatoes, gherkins and the list could go on.

During the summer month gherkins were fermented. This is a very weird thing in Western Europe, but we grew up on it. My grandma picked the gherkins, washed them thoroughly, topped and tailed them and stuffed a 5l jar with them as tight as possible. She put salt, a huge bunch of dill (also picked from the garden), some garlic, horseradish and sourdough bread on the top, covered it loosely and essentially let it rot under the warm sun...

This is a dessert that consists of a milk poached soft meringue that floats on crème anglaise. It is served cold or at room temperature. There is also a French variation ‘Île Flottante’ and a 19^th century American cookbook mentions it as a 4^th July dessert. 

I first came across this dessert in my childhood. My grandmother used to make it, and I remember visiting her on one Sunday afternoon. She used to have a north facing ladder with thick walls and...